Hot take: It’s no stupider than any other pickup truck, and at least it stands out. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fugly as hell, but that’s still better than being indistinguishable from every other vehicle in its class.
Social status. The main reason for wanting to stand out (other than your own ego) is because having a higher social status will offer the individual more opportunities in these social games we play.
I’m 99% certain that’s a 2nd Gen Honda Acty. Which means it has at best a .7 liter engine making 45hp.
The wannabe monster truck at minimum would have a 4.3 V6 making almost 300hp. But the particular spec in the picture typically has the 5.3 V8 at around 355 HP.
Kei trucks are cool. But they’re like a big golf cart with a flatbed.
I have a Daihatsu Hijet on my property. Pretty much use it like a quad. Spray paint camo job, 4x4, dump bed, w/ rear locker. Pretty awesome at pulling shit, getting thru muddy spots, etc.
I’ll say this - that little Hijet is a much, much more capable little rig than my 2014 Taco, let alone the stupid bro-dozer in the picture. I’ll probably bring it with me elk hunting next year so I can load up the bed with elk quarters and crawl out of the bush
They stopped donating to anti-LGBT organizations 11 years ago (except for FCA and the Salvation Army, organizations that are considered anti-LGBT due to stances, not actions. They stopped donating to those in 2020 anyways.)
In the US they keep getting bigger and bigger to. I was less scared of cars while riding my bike decades ago than I am now and we had less bike infrastructure then.
Well yeah. If it was separate paths from traffic then the size of the vehicles wouldn’t really be as big of a problem. It’s just how we have to “share” with people who have no ability so share.
Takes me back to the time I was a kid and got lost riding my bike in my suburb. I ended up on the other side of the town, and to get home my stupid ass rode on the shoulder of the major highway, no helmet, going the wrong direction.
Painted bicycle gutters are car infrastructure. Bicycle infrastructure would be to remove a car lane and have a concrete barrier (or remove the road entirely)
PCPs replaced an approach called hire purchase (HP), where consumers opting for a car loan would make regular monthly payments until the loan was fully repaid, usually after three or four years. At the end, they would own the car outright. Under PCPs, consumers only pay back around half of the value of the vehicle. The rest of the value is reserved for a “balloon payment” at the end of the contract. The vast majority of consumers don’t make the balloon payment because they can’t afford it or don’t want to incur the expense. Instead, the vast majority swap their vehicle for a new one, and a new PCP deal.
I didn’t know that they have such a complex car debt bubble.
It means a lot are driving cars they can’t really afford.
Say you buy a car for £40k, finance it on PCP and you effectively make payments against a £20k loan. At the end of the agreement, you can buy the car for the remaining £20k, or hand the car back. Often the car will be worth £20k-£25k. Most dealerships will say ‘hey you can just take this new car’ and they get a £25k car for £20k. Dealerships make more sales of new cars and make more on the 2nd hand cars. Meanwhile those paying don’t actually own anything at the end and have continuous payments.
The only saving grace is if the car is worth less than the outstanding amount. If the car is worth £16k and you have £20k outstanding, you can just hand the car back and walk away. You aren’t obliged to buy the car or take out a new loan.
You can also pay off the finance yourself for the £20k, then sell that car on to get the £25k. But no one does because it’s not convenient like just taking a brand new shiny car.
This is facts. Getting rid of cars without any functinal alternative is literally just fucking over poor people. I don’t give two fucks how much ride-sharing apps could be better than people owning cars, ubering to and from work and only on that loop is $300-500+ a week depending on where you live. I’d actually imagine Australian prices are probably worse.
I don’t think you read the article. The data shows that walking and cycling went up massively, as well as increasing public transport use. This is good, and the article as a whole politely makes points compatible with this comm.
Uber only paid 58 people, it’s cool but it’s not enough to create any of the changes you’re mentioning. The article can be polite, but I can still respond to their shitty point nts however I want
It’s a study. People are normally paid to participate in studies because otherwise no-one would bother doing them.
It’s not meant to change the city overnight, it’s a study to test how people’s behaviours change if they reduce the number of cars they own, which is what we want (ideally to zero, of course).
…was pretty fucking scary. So was not being able to shoot after getting pepper spray in my eyes
Now is a good time to learn from the misfortune of others: if you’re armed at a protest, then you’ve taken on the responsibility of protection, either just for yourself or for others as well. It is therefore your duty not to be disabled by something as common as pepper spray. Get some goggles and don’t go up front without em.
Not the OP, but since the post is a picture I’m going to make a guess that the meant they couldn’t shoot pictures, not shoot a firearm. Given the fact they’re calling the vehicle a ute and it has non-US plates, I think I’d go further and say that it’s extremely unlikely that the person is armed with a firearm.
Did you know?
According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), there are around 20-30 fatal accidents related to refrigerators in the United States each year.
The majority of these accidents involve children under the age of 5 who become trapped inside the refrigerator or freezer.
Tip-over incidents are one of the leading causes of refrigerator-related fatalities, accounting for about 70% of the cases. (Source).
“Culture” is probably an overstatement. Isn’t it just horrifying zoning laws that lead to sprawl and people didn’t have a choice as there is a lack of public transportation?
It sounds like you're saying they're livng in an effective dictatorship rather than a democracy.
They should be able to choose by the way they vote.
I dont reallly know much about how planning and public services works in the USA.
Im my country we have fluctuating quality of local and national public transport investment and maintenace, and one of the sources of variation is who they're voting in to power.
When they keep voting in individualistic self-serving leaders the public infrastructure gets shat on sometimes duismantled and snaked off outside of public control. The rare time they vote for politicians who support public infrastructure and the general public, then it improves,
however briefly.
So my country is probably average on public transport - by the sounds of things, it's generally better than most of the USA - I'd rather it be better. but I tend to accept the choices made by the electorate, saddening though it may be, this is what people want.
If i'm really that bothered about it then i have to stand for election myself.
I guess it might all come down to how free and fair the elections are and how easy it is to enter and get your manifesto heard by a fair number of people.
A lack of options isn’t really the same as a dictatorship. The day to day choices are sometimes hard to abstract into an intelligent vote every 2 or 4 years. The US suffers from a lack of trust in public institutions, so they aren’t given enough funding or the right leadership to take a step back, take a good look and make tough choices that goes against reactionary NIMBYs.
The sprawl may very well be part of the culture. I just don’t like to call everything a culture, including commuting. Commuting just seems a necessity and the choice of how and how far you commute is a function of infrastructure and land value. Sounds almost too boring to organize around, but it would be important to find a solution that works for everyone, instead of just single individuals.
For all I’ve read, the lack of public transportation in US cities (or the badly managed ones) is by design, influenced on politicians by the car industry lobby.
I guess it’s the same for zoning laws? I’ve no idea, and I’m probably not exactly true, as I’m stating a huge generalization. The US is so big and diverse that there may be places with good public infrastructure.
But in a broader sense, it seems that the car lobby played a big role in how cities were designed and run.
In Canada the resistance to change is fueled by “this is how we’ve always done it” which is false as Canada was founded before the car was made. There is also a conflict of interest to reduce dependance on roads as we have a decent auto manufacturing sector and many people rely on jobs related to roads and cars. With zoning there is hesitancy to change because many of our politicians are land lords using single family homes as rentable apartments and they know that their property values will drop if we start building real multi unit residences and affordable housing.
Our cities have been caught in this style of development for decades and to try to change it really goes against the current political grain. It takes a brave and determined politician to try for change and they will meet resistance from their colleagues and parts of their voter base the entire way.
Yes, I think to work well the Land zoning and transport planning need to be hand in hand.
(and ideally serve people rather than car companies).
A local bus service is more efficient the denser the population it serves.
Rural densities will struggle to support/ warrant frequent bus services.
Really dense areas will more easily support more frequent bus services / netwoks and even trains / grade separated or exclusive land use for public transport.
It's no suprise that super dense places like Japan, Singapore, and desely populated European , Chinese regions have more public transport.
Add New York City to that list for that matter. Presumably NYC benefited from achieving it's density before cars became too powerful politically..
Urban planning and public transport should absolutely go hand-in-hand.
But on to your other point.
The key factor for transport use isn't just population or density. It's also the proportion of the population that uses public transport. And places that have more frequent public transport will have a higher proportion of the population using it than places with low quality public transport.
Imagine a city with just 100,000 people. But the local bus service is exceptional, and half the population uses it. That's a base of 50,000 people.
Imagine a city of 500,000 people. The public transport network there is average, so just 10% of the population uses it. That's 50,000 people.
Now imagine a metropolitan area of 5,000,000 people. The public transport network there is poor and infrequent. Only 1% of the population uses it. That's 50,000 people.
Three cities, same absolute number of public transport users, different modal share.
If you run frequent services, every 10 minutes or better, and services connect so that it's a two- or three-seat journey to everywhere in your city, you will have a much higher ridership than if it's an hourly bus service. That's with the same population and density.
Frequent bus services (once every 10 minutes or more) can also act as a feeder into a higher rail, light rail, tram, or metro services. In suburban, rural, and seni-rural areas, that extends the reach of your rail network.
Yes, higher density around railway stations is the best option. But where there is a lot of low-density suburban sprawl, frequent feeder buses are a good option.
Somehow there’s always a “death spiral” for public transit, especially now as people commute less. But somehow… There never is for roads. We never seem to have enough roads. Funny that.
The car lobby thing is true for LA, but I’m not sure you can apply this to every city. What is evident, is that cities that existed before cars were invented or introduced are still more pedestrian friendly (see east coast cities or European ones for example) and the ones founded after are more grid like and car friendly.
Public transportation is only worth it if there is a high enough density of people (yeah, this sub may not like to hear it), so if you have huge sprawling suburbs it’s not obvious where to even put your bus/train stations. Usually it’s great to connect centers of some sort.
So yeah, if there had been more incentive to connect centers and dense clusters of population with each other, they may have planned according to that.
That’s certainly one cause, but culture is as well. The American dream of a quarter acre in the quiet leafy suburbs, easy commute to work by car on the freeway, has been a pervasive part of culture for a long time. It’s only recently that we’ve started appreciating the unsustainable reality of that idea.
I'm coming to the belief that sometime this is an overblown excuse. I'm sure it's not true everywhere, but I just visited a friend in a medium sized (well under 100k people) Florida city, and spent a day going around by bus and foot, and it was great. Buses were reliable, air-conditioned, cheap, and traveled all the main routes, running about 18h a day, but they were barely used. Still loads of 6 lane roads, paved everything, massive parking lots, and more SUVs than I could count.
Even if you have a car for some trips, people in this city could easily reduce their usage, but they've become far too reliant on car culture. A trip to the store, 15 min walk, hop in the car. A trip downtown, 10min walk and 30min bus ride, nope... Car.
If we want more public transport, we need to encourage people use what exists when they can.
Transit needs to be competitive with cars to really see a difference. In your own example a bus somehow takes 20 minutes longer to get downtown than walking there would, which is completely ridiculous but possible with how american transit is managed.
The transit needs to be nearly as fast and convenient as cars are. The city could take some of those 6 lane roads, dedicate a bus lane, and reduce the travel time of the bus by reducing time spent in traffic and prioritizing signals at intersections for the bus.
As for zoning, it is to blame because zoning prevents density and denisty helps support transit by increasing ridership in denser areas. If every building is limited to 1 or 2 stories and has a massive parking lot, it takes more space and everything gets farther away, increasing travel times for all transportation. This also increases the costs of road maintaince, sewer and water pipes, elecitricity delivery and is just pretty much one of the most ineffecient ways for a city to use space and resources.
All I know is that PalmTran in south east Florida became wildly unpredictable during the Great Recession due to suicide by train. Many many times it was shut down do to people offing themselves on the tracks.
I read a study long time ago, I can’t find it, it’s old, and I have not kept up with new publications so take all this with a huge grain of salt. The study found that not only does a public transit system need to be available and dependable, it needs a certain amount of people too. Once a critical number of commuters used public transit it passed a tipping point where even more people began to use it. The study concluded that people seeing people take public transit will increase the likelihood that they will choose public transit next time compared to people who saw deserted public transit. It’s a chicken and egg problem on top of everything else. Keep in mind I am not an expert and I am not current with the topic.
In fact, low speed electric cars are quiet enough that they’ve considered putting speakers in them to alert pedestrians and make the absence of feedback less disconcerting for drivers.
We’re so used to ICE cars that they’ve contemplated making electric cars pretend that they have an ICE.
They already do this in Europe and other countries where mixed car/pedestrian environments are more common. Electric cars must have some form of audible signature, usually a quiet whirring sound.
fuck_cars
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